Prelim data from the FDR
(AP) A key piece of guidance equipment in the tail of a commuter plane was moving erratically before the plane crashed here this week, killing all 21 people aboard, a federal investigator said Thursday.
National Transportation Safety Board member John Goglia said information from the flight data recorder has led investigators to take a close look at the airplane's elevator. The equipment determines whether the plane goes up or down and how steeply.
The data recorder shows the plane took off with its nose up 7 degrees, which is normal takeoff pitch. The pitch was 52 degrees by the time the plane reached 1,200 feet.
''Something occurred to drive that pitch angle to 52 degrees,'' Goglia said. ''That is abnormal.''
The Beech 1900 had an elevator tab replaced at an Air Midwest facility in Huntington, W.Va., on Monday. The data recorder shows the elevator had moved erratically since then.
''We need to know which procedures were followed at the maintenance facility,'' Goglia said.
Any erratic motion may not have influenced seven other flights between the maintenance and the doomed takeoff. But the plane was near weight capacity Wednesday, which may have been a factor in the crash.
The plane, carrying 19 passengers and two crew members, took off to the south, then banked toward the airport and fell, witnesses said.
The cause of the crash the first fatal U.S. air accident in nearly 14 months was not clear and investigators said they were ruling nothing out. The plane was a twin-engine turboprop Beech 1900D, a workhorse of the commuter airline industry.
The pilot, identified by US Airways Express as Katie Leslie of Charlotte, contacted the tower at takeoff to report an emergency, said Greg Martin, a spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration. But the transmission was cut short and the emergency was not identified.
Investigators recovered the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder late Wednesday and sent them to Washington, D.C., for analysis, Goglia said.
''Both were burned, but it does appear they were in decent shape,'' he said. The voice recorder contained 34 minutes of tape.
Goglia said the Beech 1900 has been in use since the 1960s as a commuter aircraft, ''so we're going to have mishaps.''
''But recently, in the last seven or eight years, it has proven to be a very reliable airplane,'' he said. ''So we can't immediately jump to the assumption that there's an airplane problem.''
The NTSB brought 26 agents to help investigate. They walked the runway Wednesday and found some bolts and small pieces of debris, but had not determined whether they belonged to the plane, Goglia said.
Sgt. David Marshall of the North Carolina Air National Guard was arriving for work at the guard's headquarters at Charlotte/Douglas International Airport when he saw the plane about 1,000 feet in the air, its nose nearly perpendicular to the ground.
Marshall, who holds a private pilot's license, watched in horror as the plane stalled.
''The nose came down and it began to level off and it went into a second stall,'' he said Thursday as he arrived at the airport to offer his account to investigators. Flight 5481 rolled to its right and dropped rapidly, clipping a corner of a hangar before it hit the ground and burst into flames.
Dee Addison heard the impact from her airport business about 500 yards away. She ran outside to see panicked people running from a maintenance hangar as smoke billowed just outside.
''It was like a frenzy,'' she said. ''At the time we didn't know a plane had actually crashed. It didn't even look like a plane. It was totally demolished.''
No one on the ground was injured, though a portion of the hangar a maintenance facility for US Airways Express was scorched and battered. Layers of smoke poured from the wreckage, so thick ''you could taste it in your mouth,'' Addison said.
The flight originated in Lynchburg, Va., and was bound for the Greenville-Spartanburg airport in Greer, S.C., 80 miles away Officials said none of the passengers started their trip in Charlotte, though some had connected there from other flights.
A maintenance alert for the same type of plane was issued in August saying that attachment bolts for the vertical stabilizer were found lose on one plane during a scheduled inspection. And an FAA directive issued in November for the 1900D aircraft warned that screws in the elevator balance weight attachment could come lose and interfere with the horizontal stabilizer.
The plane, built in 1996, had been flown 15,000 hours and performed 21,000 takeoffs and landings. It was operated by Mesa Air Lines under the US Airways Express name.
The crash was the first involving fatalities aboard a U.S. commuter plane since that of American Airlines Flight 587 in New York on Nov. 12, 2001, in which 265 people died.